Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Strange Convergence of ChristianEscapism and Muslim Fatalism

The Strange Convergence 

by Moses E. Ochonu

Nigerians are held captive by two mutually complementary forces: the new age industry of self-help positivity and motivational thought on one side and Pentecostal Christianity on the other. The line between them is of course quite blurry.

Instead of engaging with the world as it exists and tackling the practical, everyday problems that they encounter, Nigerians have been socialized and rewired to completely deny and set aside the realities of the tangible, physical world through the power of what is called positive confession and through self-motivational escapism.

They are told by self-help gurus who write sophomoric platitudes about taking control of one's life and determining one's destiny that they should not acknowledge their conditions and problems but to rather reject them by pretending and confessing that such problems don't exist. To acknowledge reality is to engage in the abomination of "negative confession."

The next step is to refuse to do anything about such problems while trying to change the situation through the power of positive thought.

Self-help books, widely sold in Nigeria, blur the boundary between faith and secular New Age ideology, encouraging people to thrive on self-motivational claptrap rather than take practical, realistic action to ameliorate their conditions or, in some cases, to make pragmatic peace with such conditions if they're outside their capacity to solve.

The result is a curious, deadly cocktail of fatalism, unrealistic optimism, and escapism.

In Nigerian Christianity, many faithfuls interprets faith to mean that one should not acknowledge what really exists and that one could confess one's way positively out of a bad situation. The one who acknowledges his unsavory conditions is considered of weak faith. Instead of conditioning and preparing themselves to anticipate and deal with life's inevitable challenges, they shout "it's not my portion," as if to say calamity is the portion of the people who were afflicted and hobbled by adversity.

The next logical step is that people pray about even the most mundane problem that requires specific, demonstrably efficacious actions. They spiritualize quotidian, practical problems that God has given them the instruments to solve. One crude example: a child that wets the bed is taken to a deliverance home to be rid of the "bed wetting spirit."

Escapism authorizes laziness, inaction, and lethargy. Unrealistic optimism, which is underwritten by the New Age cult of positive thinking and confession, causes many Nigerians to neglect the realm of goal-setting, hard work, and focused, determined pursuit of set goals. 

Fatalism rounds out this complex psyche, convincing many Nigerians that what they are facing is divinely ordained, a natural or divine order of things (to paraphrase French theorist, Foucault).

Speaking of religion-infused fatalism, it used to be the exclusive province of Nigerian Muslims, at least that was the way it was popularly understood. This thinking is encapsulated by the Northern Nigerian Muslim attitude to death and adversity, which they casually ascribe to God or Allah and calmly accept as His will. 

"It is Allah's will," goes the refrain. In the past, people who were uncomfortable with the Nigerian Christian Pentecostal refusal to acknowledge, let alone accept the inevitability of adversity, would recommend the Muslim attitude as a preferred engagement with the world and its troubles. In truth, Muslim fatalism is only a complementary opposite of Nigerian Christian escapism and irrational hope. 

The two attitudes are opposite ends of a spectrum rooted in the same cultural refusal to acknowledge and engage critically with reality, for Muslim fatalism, like Pentecostal escapism, eschews and discourages ameliorative and remedial action by explaining every predicament as God's will.

Today, there seems to be a convergence of Nigerian Pentecostal escapism and unmoored, unrealistic optimism on one hand and Muslim fatalism on the other. For one thing, many Pentecostal Christians are now fatalists, routinely taking to God or ascribing to Him what they need to rigorously and rationally solve, or surrendering to "His will" in matters that require scientific, intellectual, or biomedical solutions.

And Muslims, for their part, have since adopted Christian positive thinking, positive confession, and escapist refusal to acknowledge reality. It is now fairly common to hear Muslims use Pentecostal Christianese to express their rejection of the bad and embrace of the good. 

Nowadays, it is not unusual to hear Muslims, especially Southwestern ones, say the words "that's not my portion" to reject (or refuse to acknowledge) what they consider adversity, even if such adversity is inevitable, inescapable, or solvable, or to reject bad fortune because "words are powerful."

Scholars (notably, Ebenezer Obadare) have already written about how Muslims in the Southwest are adopting the evangelistic methods and the language of Nigerian Pentecostal Christianity. I would go further to argue that they have also adopted the positive confession, escapism, and irrational optimism of Pentecostal Christians. 

In other words, this psychological orientation now enjoys pan-Nigerian currency and has subscribers across Nigeria's main religious divide.